Same in Python, Rust, Haskell and probably many others.

But apparently JS does work that way, that is its filter always iterates over everything and returns a new array and not some iterator object.

Hasn’t Google already made advances through its Alpha Geometry AI?? Admittedly, that’s a geometry setting which may be easier to code than other parts of Math and there isn’t yet a clear indication AI will ever be able to reach a certain level of creativity that the human mind has, but at the same time it might get there by sheer volume of attempts.

Wanted to focus a bit on this. The thing with AlphaGeometry and AlphaProof is that they really treat doing math as a game, not unlike chess. For example, AlphaGeometry has a basic set of rules, it can apply them and it knows when it is done. And when it is done, you can be 100% sure that the solution is correct, because the rules of the game are known; the 28/42 score reported in the article is really four perfect scores and three zeros. Those systems do use LLMs, but they really are only there to suggest to the system what to try doing next. There is a very enlightening picture in the AlphaGeometry paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06747-5#Fig1

You can automatically verify correctness of code the same way. For example Lean, the language AlphaProof uses internally, can be used for general programming. In general, we call similar programming techniques formal methods. But most people don’t do this, since this is more time-consuming than normal programming, and in many cases we don’t even know how to define the goal of our code (how to define correct rendering in a game?). So this is only really done when the correctness of the program is critical, like famously they verified the code of the automatic metro in Paris this way. And so most people don’t try to make programming AI work this way.

That command will produce a list of (dynamic) libraries that are being used by that helper. It will look somewhat like this (this is copied from my Arch instalation):

	linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007edb2f060000)
	libcurl.so.4 => /usr/lib/libcurl.so.4 (0x00007edb2ee6f000)
	libpcre2-8.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpcre2-8.so.0 (0x00007edb2edd1000)
	libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/libz.so.1 (0x00007edb2edb8000)
	libc.so.6 => /usr/lib/libc.so.6 (0x00007edb2ebcc000)
	libnghttp3.so.9 => /usr/lib/libnghttp3.so.9 (0x00007edb2eba9000)
	libnghttp2.so.14 => /usr/lib/libnghttp2.so.14 (0x00007edb2eb7f000)
	libidn2.so.0 => /usr/lib/libidn2.so.0 (0x00007edb2eb5b000)
	libssh2.so.1 => /usr/lib/libssh2.so.1 (0x00007edb2eb12000)
	libpsl.so.5 => /usr/lib/libpsl.so.5 (0x00007edb2eafe000)
	libssl.so.3 => /usr/lib/libssl.so.3 (0x00007edb2ea24000)
	libcrypto.so.3 => /usr/lib/libcrypto.so.3 (0x00007edb2e400000)
	libgssapi_krb5.so.2 => /usr/lib/libgssapi_krb5.so.2 (0x00007edb2e9d0000)
	libzstd.so.1 => /usr/lib/libzstd.so.1 (0x00007edb2e8ef000)
	libbrotlidec.so.1 => /usr/lib/libbrotlidec.so.1 (0x00007edb2e8e0000)
	/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 => /usr/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007edb2f062000)
	libunistring.so.5 => /usr/lib/libunistring.so.5 (0x00007edb2e250000)
	libkrb5.so.3 => /usr/lib/libkrb5.so.3 (0x00007edb2e178000)
	libk5crypto.so.3 => /usr/lib/libk5crypto.so.3 (0x00007edb2e14a000)
	libcom_err.so.2 => /usr/lib/libcom_err.so.2 (0x00007edb2e8d8000)
	libkrb5support.so.0 => /usr/lib/libkrb5support.so.0 (0x00007edb2e13c000)
	libkeyutils.so.1 => /usr/lib/libkeyutils.so.1 (0x00007edb2e8d1000)
	libresolv.so.2 => /usr/lib/libresolv.so.2 (0x00007edb2e12a000)
	libbrotlicommon.so.1 => /usr/lib/libbrotlicommon.so.1 (0x00007edb2e107000)

It might be a good idea actually to try running this both when it works and when it doesn’t, maybe there is some difference?

ldd /usr/lib/git-core/git-remote-https?

I really need to try out Mercury one day. When we did a project in Prolog at uni, it felt cool, but also incredibly dynamic in a bad way. There were a few times when we misspelled some clause, which normally would be an error, but in our case it just meant falsehood. We then spent waaay to much time searching for these. I can’t help but think that Mercury would be as fun as Prolog, but less annoying.

I actually use from time to time the Bower email client, which is written in Mercury.

Have you tried etckeeper? I haven’t, but it’s supposed to be an improvement over just using git in this usecase.

Interesting. I looked this up and I think that in Poland, the wait time in let’s say Warsaw peaked at like 2 months during pandemic, but is around 2 weeks now.

Many people living in big cities will have their exams in smaller WORDs anyway, as the pass rates tend to be higher there (not a surprise, less traffic means an easier exam). Apparently in some WORDs you can even get a new attempt the same day after failing one.

In Poland:

• driver’s permits are not a thing. In general, it’s illegal to drive without a professional instructor (with parents, for example) before getting a driving license, though a lot of people, especially in the countryside, will still do so,
• you can only drive after turning 18. You can start the course a few months earlier, but you can only take the final exam after you turn 18 (there exists a category that allows you to drive after turning 16, but it’s limited and IME extremely unpopular),
• you need to go to a paid course, which includes theory classes and at least 30 hours of driving with the instructor,
• most people drive in a car owned by the instructor or the driving school, as the car must have another pair of brakes for the instructor,
• you need to pass a theoretical and a practical exam in one of the centers (Wojewódzki ośrodek ruchu drogowego),
• the theoretical exam is just closed questions. You need to get 68 out of 74 points, but (AFAIK, this has changed over time) all the questions are known, so people will just cram them,
• the practical exam is first some maneuvers on the center grounds, and then a ride around the city. The exam is rather objective and is failed if you do any big mistake or fail any exercise twice,
• the exams are not easy. The data I found is for each WORD, but in general I feel like the pass rate is around 50% for the practical exam and 70% for theory. It’s not incommon for somebody to only pass their practical exam on like 5th attempt,
• there were supposed to be some restrictions for new drivers, but they had been discussed for a long time, even back when I passed my license before the pandemic, and I have no idea if they ever actually came into force,
• some people think that the system is super flawed. Here’s some discussion by the Supreme Audit Office in Polish: https://www.nik.gov.pl/aktualnosci/system-szkolenia-kandydatow-na-kierowcow.html,
• costwise, it’s apparently like 4000 zł for the course right now. Exams are paid per attempt, 50 zł for the theory and 200 zł for practice. 1 euro is 4.33 zł as of writing, but you need to take into account the difference in purchasing power and it’s probably not much cheaper than Germany even if you pass both exams the first time.

I am no cryptographer, but I understand that in the SSH protocol, the keys are only used for signing anyway: that is, the user is authenticated by saying “I want to authenticate with some key, and here’s some data signed by this key”, and this is completely separate to encryption. It also seems that GitHub encourages using separate keys for commit signing and general SSH access, which might alleviate some of the ickyness.

You are really not wrong though, I feel like people only started using SSH for this because it kinda worked and they already have been familiar with it.

Just wanted to say that you actually can sign git commits using SSH keys! :) It’s nowhere close to being as flexible as what you suggest, but it’s also not GPG, so there’s that.

Imagine a soccer ball. The most traditional design consists of white hexagons and black pentagons. If you count them, you will find that there are 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons.

Now imagine you tried to cover the entire Earth in the same way, using similar size hexagons and pentagons (hopefully the rules are intuitive). How many pentagons would be there? Intuitively, you would think that the number of both shapes would be similar, just like on the soccer ball. So, there would be a lot of hexagons and a lot of pentagons. But actually, along with many hexagons, you would still have exactly 12 pentagons, not one less, not one more. This comes from the Euler’s formula, and there is a nice sketch of the proof here: .

Every prime larger than 3 is either of form 6k+1, or 6k+5; the other four possibilities are either divisible by 2 or by 3 (or by both). Now (6k+1)² − 1 = 6k(6k+2) = 12k(3k+1) and at least one of k and 3k+1 must be even. Also (6k+5)² − 1 = (6k+4)(6k+6) = 12(3k+2)(k+1) and at least one of 3k+2 and k+1 must be even.